James Bond Will Never Be a Woman, Says Series Producer

Bond 25 has just gone into production with director Cary Fukunaga but we’re already at least three years into the speculation about who will play the next James Bond after Daniel Craig retires from the role. One of the big questions around Craig’s eventual replacement is whether the producers will choose another white guy or perhaps break with tradition dating back to the 1960s and the first Bond film and instead pick someone radically different. Perhaps an actor of color? Or how about a woman? Could we someday hear the line “The name is Bond. Jane Bond.”?

According to one of the key voices making that decision, the answer is a definite no. Barbara Broccoli, the longtime executive producer of the Bond franchise, said that there will won’t be a female Bond. In an interview with The Guardian, she said:

Bond is male. He’s a male character. He was written as a male and I think he’ll probably stay as a male. And that’s fine. We don’t have to turn male characters into women. Let’s just create more female characters and make the story fit those female characters.

In giving such a decisive answer, I’d say Broccoli didn’t learn the lesson of the Bond film Never Say Never Again — but that’s the one Bond movie her company didn’t make. Clearly, she hasn’t seen that one.

Broccoli did say she’s open to a woman directing or writing a Bond film. (“As a female producer, of course I’d like to do that.”) Of course, she hasn’t hired one yet, even after Bond 25’s original director, Danny Boyle, left the project following creative differences with Broccoli and her company. The rules of casting are changing all over the pop-culture landscape. But they appear to be changing more slowly in the Bond universe. This is probably not surprising; Bond fans got pissed off when Craig first got the job because he was blonde. If that got them in a tizzy, you can only imagine how they would react to a more extreme change.